Choosing cable colors in VCV 1.0

VCV Rack
22

Here’s useful app that can choose colour schemes just press spacebar to generate

1 Like
23

Here’s another useful one:
https://paletton.com/#uid=72D0u0kw0iivH7Ytkb+FlmeJpnt

24

What’s a good color convention for cables?

The Reddit modular community mostly uses colors to indicate cable length:
What’s your cable color scheme?
Do you color code cables?

That’s not very useful for VCV Rack, of course, so color can show the cable function. Omri Cohen does that in a video where he uses the four default colors to match four signal kinds:

  • pulses (clocks, trigger, gates)
  • control voltages (modulation, LFOs, envelopes)
  • V/oct (special CV for note frequencies)
  • audio

This is useful already but we can have more colors, either by directly editing the settings-v1.json file or by using the awesome Submarine Wire Manager module.

Here is the scheme I came up with:

  • Purple, #e000e0: clock. Periodic short pulses.
  • Blue, #2070ff: trigger. Short pulses.
  • Teal, #409090: reset. Short pulses.
  • Cyan, #00d0ff: gate. Long pulses.
  • Green, #00d000: V/oct, note CV.
  • Brown, #905000: LFO and envelope CV.
  • Orange, #ff9030: timbre CV.
  • Yellow, #e0e000: amplitude CV.
  • Black, #000000: audio-rate modulation (sync, ring, FM, etc.).
  • Pink, #ff90ff: mono audio.
  • White, #ffffff: left channel audio.
  • Red, #ff3030: right channel audio.
  • Grey, #808080: miscellaneous.

(Can’t set the background color, natch.)

It groups colors into three groups: cold colors for pulses, warm ones for CV, hot ones for audio.

What is your preference? Do you use cable colors in a similar fashion?

More prior art

The Nysthi plugins color conventions

The XOR plugins color conventions

The Submarine Wire Manager module

In addition to allowing one to easily choose one’s favorite colors, this module has two very useful features:

  1. enabling a subset of colors, so one does not have to cycle through all of them all the time;

  2. highlight the cables connected to a module when the mouse cursor hovers over that module.

Thank you so much, David O’Rourke. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

25

I like the color scheme offered by Omri Cohen. In my opinion, using more than 4 colors becomes difficult. You have to distract from the workflow to think about what color cable to use. But that’s dificult just for me :slight_smile:

26

I tend to use different, strongly contrasted colors to have a “first glance” of what is going on in the patch.

And now that the Submarine WireManager can save the collections of color cables, why don’t just share the collections?

It’s not difficult at all (I can do it so everybody can): IN THIS THREAD there is a brief explanation about how to do it.

Highly recomended: NOTEPAD++ and JSON LINT.

1 Like
27

I you feel inclined on color theory also have a look at https://color.adobe.com/de/create

1 Like
28

Since the WM-101 now allows you to save and load collections. Here are some that Jim Allman put together

2 Likes
29

Me is just using default yellow and default blue colored wires ["#c9b70e", “#0986ad”]. Kind of binary.